Video Comparing Drupal Usability with Wordpress
public
group: Usability
kentbye - Sat, 2008-04-19 06:55
Andy and Selena produced a video that does a really great comparison between Wordpress and Drupal.
They talk a lot about the usability pitfalls that Drupal runs into, and how Wordpress focuses on users while Drupal focuses on Developers, and what that means for the communities that the users are interacting with. There is a lot about Drupal from a usability perspective in this video, especially in the admin interfaces, and a bit about drupal.org.
All in all, they have a lot of pretty interesting observations.
The video is 18 minutes and starts off a bit slow, but it’s definitely worth checking out:
There are plenty of Drupal "Consumers"
We just don't hear much about/from them.
Projects focus on two very differnt groups.
True, but there are also three major groups of users: Developers, Administrators, and End-Users (which typically aren't the people in the discussion). Wordpress is MUCH more End-Users focused while we are very Dev. focused and somewhat Admin. focused. What we need to do is work on segregating the expereince for the two major groups, Drupal informed and Drupal uninformed users.
Informed users (devs, themers, admins) are able to figure out what they need to do and will go through some strife because they understand that powerful systems aren't always usable. Part of the struggle i've seen is to get uninformed users that don't want to know they are using drupal, to use drupal. Those that see Drupal and say "OMG CMS" and those that see Drupal and want to say "Cool, a blog...I think" seem to lead to Drupal ineffectively serving both groups. It's almost like we need more installation profiles (and powerful descriptions for them) in order to bring more uninformed users on board. If there was the base state of drupal for the power-hungery / drupal-informed users, and then just a bunch of slick install profiles (like Wiki site, Blog site, online text/book) it could help bridge the gap.
Maybe sitting down with users and seeing exactly what they want to do with Drupal (at a high level site descirption) could help come up with some of these installation profiles. I think this would be a good solution to keeping Drupal power focused and flexible but still serving the average joe/jill-blogger.
Install Profiles
I like the idea of 'a bunch of slick install profiles.' Having site type specific (blog, wiki, etc.) sounds cool. Industry specific could work too as many people looking for a web solution are looking for industry specific type solution. For example, a small business identity site out of the box with a few pages and a contact form, a band site with a news page and some music downloading/streaming functionality, a restaurant site with a google maps or photo gallery integration and menu content type etc. etc.
If nothing else, these could be great starting points for people trying to learn more about the possibilities of drupal.
winced?
Anyone who winced at the content type/taxonomy admin comparison - here's a patch: http://drupal.org/node/268914